For one violin and one player

Composer Notes:

Contemporary new music concert programs are littered with the same exact description: “this piece is an exploration of colour, texture, and timbre.” I hate it. “Colour,” in this context, is code for dull grey: fourteen minutes of intellectual sonic diarrhea—without the thrill of soilage or its foul colours. They desaturate the concert experience via shallow jargon that fails to describe the intricacies of the music. I hate it.

This music prominently features conventional instrumentation. I don’t hate it. That part I can actively accept. After all, new music ensembles are built around specific instruments, and I fully support writing for standard groupings. Every work does not need to be innovative in this regard. But what is texturally radical about a string quartet, or a standard chamber orchestra? Adding a marimba does not an exploratory texture make.

My problem is not with convention or traditional instrument groupings, but rather with the overzealous, exaggerated promise of exploration. You can investigate familiar textures in your practice. Show the listener these journeys. Make them hear and feel the textures travel. There is no need to inflate the relevance of texture in the music with vapid rhetoric. This strategy may work in competitions, grant awards, and school applications, but the audience and I will not believe you. We—but mostly I—hate it when you do that.

Besides describing instrument combinations, texture can also be used to define function. There are established functional textural layers that operate across popular and classical concert traditions (see Moore 2012). Audiences, composers, and most western music enthusiast favour these four layers: the rhythmic layer (i.e., the groove), harmonic filler layer, melodic layer, and bass layer. The general public can typically identify these functional textures, often seeking them out while listening to music.

Most new music, though it desperately tries to distance itself from popular music and common-practice tropes, typically uses the same functional textural layers. Rarely do I hear the complete omission—or challenge—of these layers in contemporary new music concerts. That’s okay: these functional layers are excellent. I use them too. In fact, I really don’t hate them at all. My problem, however, is with designating standard musical practices as innovative in the context of new music—“explorations of texture”—when they are just staples of most contemporary styles. We are not better or more intelligent than the singer-songwriter because we use specialized jargon. In many respects, we are doing a lot of the same things: it just sounds different.

A lot of Western music, I argue, performs some type of textural exploration. For instance, Renaissance madrigalists use different imitation and homorhythmic textures throughout their settings; Classical symphonies employ contrasting movements and sections, built around different instrument combinations and functions; and most post-20thcentury new music uses contrasting textures to differentiate between formal sections. Most popular song revolves around different textures to distinguish between verse, bridge, and chorus—not to mention intro and outro. Even solo works articulate form through textural differentiation (e.g., Paganini alternating lyrical and percussive passages). Describing a piece as “an exploration of texture,” therefore, is the musical equivalent of saying “this restaurant serves food.”

New music’s caged bird—timbre—is probably its worst victim. It sings via a pissing contest of extended techniques—typically the same, now orthodox techniques: multiphonics, key clicks, and breath tones; seagull squawks, marmot whistles, and smoker cat meows. The usual zoology. The techniques may differ drastically between instruments and pieces, but overall it always “sounds” and, most importantly, feels the same.

Juries reward these recurring techniques—those poor birds—and their “creative notation” in the score. This is such an aesthetic priority that composers—especially students—follow checklists, trying to cram every popular extended technique into a single piece. I hate it. This is not musically interesting. It is a rhetorical tactic designed to inflate the music’s apparent artistic and intellectual status.

What about other extended techniques and their unique timbres? No one is running over a cello with a lawnmower, deep-frying a tuba, or routing a nun’s fart through a pitch modulator/drum randomizer and lavender scented bubble machine. Those would at least be exploratory timbres in some sense: I have yet to hear these in a concert hall. Let the birds escape their grey intellectual cages to actually explore timbral possibilities.

For one violin and one player pries the rhetorical “exploration of colour, texture, and timbre” trope apart. It performs a sincere exploration of timbre, texture, and performance possibilities. The concept is clear. The audience will hear and feel this exploration. Throw the intellectual baby out with the institutional new music bath water.

One player invites one player—an audience member with no musical experience, special guest, or virtuoso—to perform a single sounding action on the violin (with optional bow). I do not overly define “single action.” It can be as minimal as bowing one sustained note, or as elaborate as shooting the violin into space. The player is free to create whatever sound and performance they wish, as long as they do not harm others. When the action is complete, the performance ends.

In the unfortunate event that a player plays more than one action, the performance will be stopped immediately. The player will be escorted out of the venue. A replacement player will be selected, and a new single action will be performed. I enforce this “rule” to preserve one player’s single-action premise and to keep the action clear. Such strict adherence to a governing number is also what connects all the pieces in the For one violin series.

Anyone with one violin (and optional bow) can perform one player. This turns the focus away from the technical mastery required for popular extended techniques and hollow jargon, and towards the actual affordances of exploration. One player needs no vapid rhetoric: it is, quite literally, an exploration of what the violin and performer can do. The player’s and organizer’s imaginations are the only limitation. The birds are free to roam. I love it.